Joshua’s Story shares the harm caused when we fail to document healthcare and don’t provide frontline healthcare workers with the modern decision support tools that they need to efficiently do their work, receive timely notification of the deteriorating health of Patients and ensure they are capable of learning from mistakes they make so that the reasons can be understood and they’re never repeated.

The Learning Clinic’s VitaPac is my favourite example of a mHealth company that is doing great things in this area (eg. their VitalPAC app is today helping more than 15,000 NHS nurses record more 10 million sets of Patient Observations per year) and it surprises me that Patient Care Quality Campaign and Pressure Groups aren’t doing more to champion the Hospitals that are adopting such modern systems:

If you attend a Hospital that’s still not adequately supporting their staff to properly do the job and still relying on error prone paper charts please feel encouraged to share this URL TheLearningClinic.co.uk with the CEO along with your thoughts about why it would improve your confidence in the quality of the care that they’re providing.

Thanks for picking up this angle of “Joshua’s Story” – It’s a really valid point. The reliance on written records and memory for such importance vital signs monitoring (and escalation) is archaic, especially when several excellent systems (Patient Track is the one I know best) exist.

As Exec Producer of the http://www.patientstories.org.uk site I also wanted to respond to your comments about our t&c’s. All our films are independently funded, which means licensing revenues for use by educational institutions and organisations are the only direct source to research & produce the films, and run the website.

Anyone can watch the films on-line at no cost and for a relatively small payment, they can be licensed for work in small groups or for use if “formal” educational / learning programmes.

Unfortunately, we have found is that a number of (multi-million pound) healthcare organisations and commercial training companies decide that copyright law doesn’t apply to them and they go ahead anyway.

Personally, I’d prefer it if we could make all this work freely available on-line (without all the work we have to put into licensing etc) – If you have an alternative business model, then I’d be delighted to hear it.

Also, there is nothing to stop you emailing me directly and I’d happily have provided you with some embed code. In fact, I still will 🙂

It’s rare to see such high quality story telling skills so I would be delighted to take the opportunity to meet up with you next time I’m in the UK to share some ideas I have about possible ways you could leverage other distribution channels (like YouTube) and syndicated partners with their own websites to further share your quality video content and at the same time generate funds to continue your good work.